Interactive Voice Response (“IVR”) systems have the ability to identify callers and play unique messages that are ‘tailored’ just for these specific callers. The major problem associated with these systems is the cost involved, as each IVR port is one of the most expensive resources in a contact center environment.
Another type of systems related to contact center environment, are traditional Automatic Call Distribution (“ACD”) systems which have the ability to play voice messages to any number of callers at a given time, using single voice resource. Typically, ACD software can ensure that each customer listen to the voice message once, or in the alternative, can play a repeating voice message in an endless loop. The problem associated with this method, is, that the voice message played by the ACD is a fixed and pre-determined message, that must be pre-recorded and cannot be changed.
Various automatic telephone systems and ACD systems are well known in the art per se and will not be described here in detail. Such systems are found for example in U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,718; U.S. Pat. No. 5,025,468 and other publications. Typically, in operation, the callers are placed on hold in a queue and then, are connected to the next available agent according to a priority decisions, for interaction communication.
According to traditional contact center systems, after understanding who is the caller and what are his/her needs, the call can be left on an IVR port while waiting to a live agent or be placed on PBX queue (ACD) until such time that appropriate agent will become available. However, such an ACD scheme does not have the capability of collecting a number of callers to allow broadcasting of a message to the collected callers. Also, separate connections are required to be made in the ACD scheme to each, one for each separate agent. In other words, provisions are not made for providing a single message source, nor for connecting that message source to one or more groups of assembled callers.
Some attempts were made to solve this drawback. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,515,421 a method is described for assembling callers by a common pre-determined attribute, such as a caller I.D., to a group, and holding that group of callers in a queue for the broadcast of a pre-recorded message.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,314,178 describes a method and apparatus for enabling interaction between callers with calls positioned in a queue. The call handling system allows queuing a call when no agent is available to service the call and provides the caller with options to keep him/her busy, e.g. to monitor (but not participate in) other caller conversations with similar queries, to listen to recorded calls involving similar queries; or to connect to a communication channel so as to allow the monitoring of a call while not losing place in the queue for a next available agent. Also, the caller is given a further option to enter a “chat room” where callers having like problems can converse until an agent becomes available.
The disclosures of all references mentioned above and throughout the present specification are hereby incorporated herein by reference.
However, none of these solutions provide adequate solution to better utilization of the system resources, in certain cases where a message is broadcasted to a number of callers.